Products

Expected Products of Inventory

Some of the possible products and services resulting from the Fungal Inventory are discussed below.

Provide answers to scientific questions:

Data from the Inventory will have direct application to a number of key questions being asked by the scientific community. These include such basic questions as: How many fungi are there in the world? How are they distributed across the landscape and the globe? What does this fungal distribution data tell us about the possible effects that historical events such as glaciation, mountain building, and continental plate movements had on the distribution of plants, animals, and fungi? What levels of host, substrate, forest type, etc. specificity do fungi exhibit? How does this specificity influence the success or failure of land management decisions?

Additionally, the Inventory will provide the necessary base-line data for future efforts aimed at monitoring the effect of environmental changes due to global warming, pollution, forest fragmentation, and other environmental perturbations. The Inventory also will provide important data to address other ecological questions and answer fungal life history questions.

Lastly, the Inventory will result in the accumulation of research specimens and cultures as well as the discovery of many new species. These materials will serve as a source for many different studies by the systematics, ecology, physiology, genetic, and conservation communities. Some direct products from these studies will be the UBIs, databases, WWW sites, and monographs of taxa based on the collections and cultures.

Provide educational opportunities:

The Inventory will provide education opportunities and resources for diverse audiences. Data acquired on ecology, life histories, mutualisms, etc. can be incorporated into the school curriculum at levels from primary school through university and into graduate training. However, these data are not simply valuable for traditional classroom teaching. Adult learning opportunities such as volunteer, ecotourism, and other programs should be enriched with information on the vital role that fungi play in the environment. Finally, data on fungi need to reach citizens, land managers, and politicians to help inform the crucial decisions that they make.

It is important, therefore, that the information resulting from the Inventory is packaged not only in traditional text book form, but also as fully illustrated and colorful natural history books and field guides, CD-Rom titles, WWW sites, videos, as well as other items such as coloring books, calendars, postcards, posters, etc. These information guides should be made available in both Spanish and English and should target a variety of knowledge levels. Incorporating volunteers into aspects of the Inventory and providing Weekend short courses for young children, as well as interested adults would be good ways to reach additional people.

Provide the raw materials for projects with potential for high economic return

Natural Products screening:

This includes providing fungi for natural products screening programs searching for new pharmaceutical, biocontrol, agribusiness, and industrial products. Microfungi are very important sources of novel compounds with hundreds of species having U.S. and international patents. Many pharmaceutical, agribusiness, biotech, and other companies have ongoing natural products screening programs. The three fungal groups included in the inventory have high potential for containing novel compounds.

Mushroom harvesting and cultivation: Mushrooms and other macrofungi have been used as food for thousands of years throughout much of the world. While eating wild fungi is not an important part of the Costa Rican culture, many choice edible fungi can be found growing in the forests, and environmental conditions are acceptable to consider developing a mushroom cultivation industry. It has been estimated that the value of the mushroom harvest exceeds the timber value over the normal rotation time (60 years) in coastal forests of British Columbia, Canada. However, actual profits change drastically from year to year depending on market price and fruiting of the target fungi. A farmer group in Oxaca, Mexico is developing a program to grow and market the spawn of edible mushrooms as this should fluctuate in price less than the actual mushrooms. Appropriate fungi and markets would need to be identified as first steps into investigating the financial possibilities of developing an edible mushroom industry in Costa Rica. At a minimum, it seems likely that small mushroom farms and limited harvesting of selected fungi could be developed for local distribution to restaurants and the tourist trade.

Provide the content for other projects

A number of other products could be developed through the Inventory. These include items such as books and services such as short courses and workshops for training natural history guides as well as ecotourists. Information for the medical community on toxic and edible mushrooms could be another series of products. Less obvious are the tools and products that will be developed as part of the Inventory itself, such as database structures, methods for maintaining and organizing culture collections and natural history specimens, and most importantly, the data and images contained in these collections.